Abstract:
The study of compliment speech act has been under investigation on many occasions in recent years. In this study, an attempt is made to explore appraisals performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners to find out how these two groups diverge or converge from each other with regard to complimenting patterns and norms. The participants of the study were 60 advanced Iranian EFL learners who were speaking Persian as their first language and 60 native English speakers. Through a written Discourse Completion Test (DCT) comprised of eight different scenarios, compliments were analyzed with regard to topics (performance, personality, possession, and skill), functions (explicit, implicit, and opt-out), gender differences and the common positive adjectives used by two groups of native and nonnative participants. The findings revealed that native English speakers praised individuals more implicitly in comparison with Iranian EFL learners and native speakers provided opt-outs more frequently than Iranian EFL learners did. The analysis of data by Chi-square showed that gender and macro functions are independent of each other among Iranian EFL learners’ compliments while for native speakers, gender played a significant role in the distribution of appraisals. Iranian EFL learners’ complimenting patterns converge more towards those of native English speakers. Moreover, both groups favored explicit compliments. However, Iranian EFL learners were more inclined to provide explicit compliments. It can be concluded that there were more similarities rather than differences between Iranian EFL learners and native English speakers regarding compliment speech act. The results of this study can benefitresearchers, teachers, material developers, and EFL learners.
Machine summary:
Through a written Discourse Completion Test (DCT) comprised of eight different scenarios, compliments were analyzed with regard to topics (performance, personality, possession, and skill), functions (explicit, implicit, and opt-out), gender differences and the common positive adjectives used by two groups of native and nonnative participants.
The purpose of this study is to compare complimenting patterns between native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners with regard to topics, functions, gender differences and adjective types used in utterances.
To this end, the following detailed research questions are proposed: (1)What are the differences between compliment functions produced by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners with regard to gender?
The vast literature reveals that compliments are studied according to the function(s) they play in interactions (Czopp, 2008; Maíz-Arévalo & García-Gómez, 2013; Mustapha, 2012; Wolfson & Manes, 1980), gender differences (Herbert, 1990; Holmes, 1988; Rees-Miller, 2011; Wolfson, 1984), cross-cultural comparison (Chen & Rau, 2011; Maíz-Arévalo, 2012; Sharifian, 2005; Wolfson, 1981), and compliments at the workplace (Hudak, Gill, Aguinaldo, Clark, & Frankel, 2010).
Current Study Literature review showed that there is paucity of research with regard to the analysis of compliment utterances performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners through a written Discourse Completion Test.